There’s some debate about whether Bob Dylan should be considered a poet. I am surprised about that. Bob Dylan has been made the Nobel Laureate for poetry – and it’s no surprise to me at all.

One of the first albums I bought was Highway 61 Revisited and it remains my favourite Bob Dylan album. It completely changed the way I thought about poetry – when I was 16.

Since then I have listened to most Dylan records, including the bootlegs and I know more Dylan poetry than any other poet. I don’t know it by rote, I know it by heart. Sometimes my memory creates versions of his lines that aren’t what he sung, for I know them as I heard them when I was young.

I cannot think of any other poets – well only Shakespeare- that has so informed my sensibility. I’m glad to see the Nobel judges singled Dylan out for influencing the course of American lyric poetry. I don’t think Springsteen could have written Darkness on the Edge of Town or Johnny Cash – the American Recordings or Kris Kristofferson – Sunday Morning Pavement- if Dylan hadn’t shown them how.

When I was at Cambridge in the early 80s , Christopher Ricks would bring in his ghetto blaster to Shakespeare and Milton lectures. When the lecture was done, he would do another on a Dylan Song. I remember 30 minutes on the line in Love Minus Zero/No Limit

“my love she’s like some raven, at my window with a broken wing”.

I never listened to the song or read Edgar Allen Poe the same way again. The poem is a good place to start. Here is Dylan singing it.

There is nothing remotely odd about a popular singing being acknowledge a great poet. Homer sang and his poetry is simply a transcription of his songs. Lyric poetry informs middle English, Elizabethan and everything since from folk through the blues to pop. Morrissey and Curtis, Yeats and Hardy – British poetry intertwines the popular folk traditions just as in America.

We do not have to wait for a genius to die to acknowledge him or her. Dylan was and is a genius- the greatest poet of the second half of the 20th century in my book.

Interviewer: Why does it bother you when people sometimes refer to you as a voice of your generation?

Dylan: I think that was just a term that can create problems for somebody, especially if someone just wants to keep it simple and write songs and play them. Having these colossal accolades and titles – they get in the way.

Interviewer: You’re saying it made it harder for you to just do your job.

Dylan: Yeah, absolutely.

Interviewer: I guess it’s your fault ’cause you went and wrote all those lyrics that a lot of people think speak to them.

Dylan: (Laughing) Yeah. And that’s OK. When it becomes a problem – like, when we get known outside of our field, then we’re known by people who don’t really know – who’ve never had any experience with what we do. Or we’re just names.

You know, sometimes a person’s reputation can be far more colossal than the influence of the person. I don’t pay any attention to it anymore.

So I was trying to reconstruct the feeling of what it does feel like to have anything like that thrown at you, where you’re expected to be something that you just flat-out know you’re not.